Measuring Matching among Brand Associations: a Case-Study in the Fashion Online Communities

In this manuscript a novel approach to measure brand association matching in virtual environments is applied. This innovative approach allows to compare company-defined with consumers-perceived brand associations in online brand studies also in terms of strength. It combines: i) existing text-mining techniques to collect the data from online communities, and ii) Hybrid Log-Linear models for estimating the company-defined and the consumers-perceived brand association matching and strength. This approach provides an innovative marketing tool for companies and brand managers for defining the brand communication as well as the brand strategies. The proposed method is applied to real data extracted from online fashion communities and related to a famous fashion brand.